


Siren

by blithers



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/M, Loss of Virginity, Male Virginity, Mildly Dubious Consent, Psychic Bond, Ritual Sex, Virgin Sacrifice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-22
Updated: 2018-10-12
Packaged: 2019-06-29 09:10:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15726348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blithers/pseuds/blithers
Summary: “I think,” Caleb said, still reading, “the wordsacrificeis a poor choice in this case.  This spell actually seems to need somebody who has, ah, never had sex before to, um, do.  That.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story takes place in an AU world pre-episode 26, where Molly hasn't died and the original Mighty Nein crew continues adventuring for a time.
> 
> Thank you so much to my beta readers, blackestglass and masonjo.

They ended up in Sailhaven to investigate rumors of shipwrecks in the shipping lanes near the port on a request from the Stubborn Stalk. They took the job to help the mercenary group deal with the onslaught of work coming to them from the Empire, as the vast resources of the government diverted to the front of the great war in the east. The two mercenary groups had been drinking together after a day stomping out fire-breathing lizards with delusions of draconic grandeur that had infested a local meadery, and Fjord had mentioned wanting to see the Menagerie Coast again. Darrow had offered the standard cut if the group wanted to stop into the small sea town on their way and resolve the stoppage in trade, and they’d accepted the work, relishing the chance to get out of the Empire for a time.

As it turned out, an actual, real-life, ship-wrecking, seducing-people-with-her-literal-song siren was not something they were equipped to deal with.

 

-

 

“Damn, that hurts,” Beau said, and prodded her shoulder, which had been pulled out of the socket near the end of their fight while Beau had been staring worshipfully at the siren. It had been inelegantly popped back in by Caleb, after Jester and Nott had managed to round up the entranced men (plus Beau) and flee, barely making it out alive as the siren’s spell wore off with distance.

Jester rolled her eyes - it was always _Jester, heal this_ and _if only there was somebody around who knew how to cast healing spells_ after fights, combined with significant glances at her and the symbol of the Traveler she wore. “You’ll make it,” she said to Beau, and laid hands on Molly, who was bleeding heavily from numerous self-inflicted cuts along his shoulders as well as a deeply vicious, racking gash across his abdomen from the siren’s taloned claws. He shuddered under her touch as the healing spell sunk into him. Jester felt the last of her magic leave her, and there was nothing more she could do for the day.

“Thanks,” Molly said softly.

Caleb was slumped on the floor in the back of the boat, a hand over his eyes, still reeling from the enchantment the siren had cast - he’d been knocked unconscious, bleeding out onto the ground for several long, horrifying minutes before Jester had managed to cast a single desperate spell in the midst of fending off the siren’s brutal attacks. Nott was sitting beside Caleb, clutching his hand protectively, seeming to have forgotten about the horrors of being on a boat after what they'd just faced.

Fjord brought their rented boat into the dock, limping as he tied up the small vessel, his hands moving with the automatic, weary competence of ingrained physical memory. Jester held the boat steady against the dock as he worked.

They shuffled back to the tavern where they’d rented rooms the previous evening, Beau feeling out the range of motion in her injured shoulder and Jester supporting Molly as they walked.

“Well,” Beau said grimly, as they reached the front door. “That sucked.”

Nott brought her mask up to cover her face. “That could not have sucked more.”

“We can’t fight that thing again.”

“It’s the devil’s own luck that we made it out,” Molly said, still clutching his partially-healed torso.

“We need a plan B,” Caleb said.

Fjord stumbled as he pushed the door open. “And a strong drink.”

 

-

 

They reconvened in the common room the next afternoon, with Nott fast approaching drunk and Caleb deep into a book of lore about monsters of the water and sea.

Jester cast a minor healing spell on Beau’s stiffened shoulder, and checked on Molly’s torso, which was stitching up nicely. She was playing cards idly with Molly, wagering rapidly increasing sums of coin, when Caleb cleared his throat and Fjord put down the dagger he’d been sharpening.

“I found a spell that might help our current predicament,” Caleb said, and read aloud: “ _For the vanquishment of sirens and medusas, to avoid the eyesight and hearing of those most evil beasties_.”

“Well, that sounds right,” Beau said. “Can you do it?”

“It seems to be within my power.”

“What does it require?”

“100 gold worth of white chalk, 3 star opals, paint,” Caleb skimmed ahead, “a - ah - virgin sacrifice.” He blinked.

Silence settled over the table.

“We have to _kill somebody_ who’s never even had sex?” Jester asked, aghast. Killing somebody who’d never even done it was just _mean_. Next to her, Molly drew his thumb across his neck and yanked sharply upward, lolling his tongue out of the corner of his mouth.

“I think,” Caleb said, still reading, “the word _sacrifice_ is a poor choice in this case. This spell actually seems to need somebody who has, ah, never had sex before to, um, do. That.”

Beau started to laugh. “You mean some virgin has to fuck somebody for this thing to work? That’s some dirty spell you’ve got going on, Caleb.”

“I didn’t _write_ it,” he said, stiffly. “I’m merely relaying what the scroll says to the group, as requested.”

Jester tapped her chin. “So we have to find somebody who’s a virgin and convince them to have sex?” That was so much better! That was definitely in her wheelhouse.

“I nominate Caleb,” Molly said, sprawling back in his chair and seeming to very much enjoy the conversation. “It’s his spell, after all.”

“I am - not a viable option for this spell.”

“Mmm, somebody scratched all that dirt off of you at some point, did they? Lucky them.”

“I can do it,” Nott said stoutly. “I’m of child-bearing...”

“NO!” five voices shouted in unison.

Nott puffed herself up with outrage, as much as a three foot tall goblin could reasonably be said to be puffed up with outrage. “I’M AN ADULT LADY GOBLIN, AND -”

“Nott, my friend.” Caleb placed a hand on Nott’s shoulder. “You don’t have to do this.”

“I don’t know about the rest of y’all, but I’m out,” Beau informed them smugly. “It’s too bad Yasha isn’t here, though.”

“Do both people in this scenario need to be virgins, or just the one?” Fjord asked, in his totally earnest, planning-something-ridiculous-for-the-good-of-the-group voice.

“Maybe you need multiple virgins all working in concert for this spell to work,” Molly said. “Let’s not be small-minded here.”

“Just the one, I believe.” Caleb flipped back a page to re-examine the spell components. “Frankly, I don’t see how we’re going to be able to find somebody for this. The rest of the ingredients for this spell are commonplace, but we can’t just walk up to random strangers and ask, _Excuse me, but have you done the dirty deed before, and, if not, would you mind having ritual sex this very evening in order to magically slay a siren_?”

“Maybe _you_ can’t ask people that,” Molly said.

“I’ll do it,” said Fjord.

“After all,” Caleb continued, “we need to - wait, what?”

Fjord shifted on the tavern bench as the group’s attention swung to him. “This spell, you say it requires a virgin?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll do it.”

“You’ll -”

“I fit the stated requirement,” Fjord said flatly.

Beau narrowed her eyes. “Didn’t you say you _weren’t_ a virgin, a while back?”

“I... might have lied.”

“Why would you lie? To _us_?” Jester really meant _to me_ , but she figured, a bit wistfully, that the point was probably the same either way.

“It seemed - easier, at the time.”

Beau snapped her fingers and pointed at Fjord. “I knew it!”

Molly started to grin. “Oh boy.”

“Weren’t you a sailor?” Nott asked. “You know, a dirty dog of the sea?”

“The opportunity never... came up, so to speak.” Fjord sounded a bit awkward now, in that odd, formal way he had when he was on the defensive, and which always thoroughly enchanted Jester.

Molly lifted an eyebrow. “You do realize that something is going to have to _come up_ for this plan to work, right?”

Fjord shot Molly a withering look. “I am aware, yes.”

“Well, there you go.” Beau clapped her hands. “Let’s de-virginate this green dude and stop this siren in her ship-wrecking tracks.”

“I don’t understand why everybody is okay with Fjord doing this but not me,” Nott said, gnawing with pointed teeth on the leather strap she’d stolen from the local stables a couple days ago.

“Don’t get too excited yet,” Caleb said. “We still need a second volunteer for this scheme to work,” and Jester’s heart started to beat super fast, because oh. _Oh_.

“Right,” Beau said. “Well, don’t take this the wrong way, Fjord, but you are so not my type, man.”

“I’d be game,” Molly said, examining his fingernails.

Nott spat out the leather she’d been chewing. “Me too.”

“I would as well,” Caleb said. “Alternatively, we could ask the tavern owner if they know of a way to provide paid companionship for the evening.”

Jester cleared her throat a bit, hoping she didn’t sound _too_ weird about it. “I’m in. You know, if that’s what Fjord wants, and all.”

“It’s your choice,” Caleb said gently to Fjord.

“Will this spell work?” Fjord asked Caleb directly.

“As best I can tell, it should.”

Fjord sunk his face into his hands.

There were so many questions that Jester wanted to ask Fjord at that moment - why he’d never slept with anybody when sex was so awesome; was he really okay with this idea; why he’d lied about being a virgin in the first place; was he into guys or girls or orcs or humans or tieflings or what; had he ever even, like, made out with anybody ever? - but the next thing she knew, Fjord was mumbling, “I guess I choose Jester.”

Jester’s head snapped up. Fjord wasn’t looking at her. A shot of adrenaline made Jester start to breathe faster, because, oh gods, he was so _handsome_.

“Okay,” she said, but she thought her voice sounded strange. She cleared her throat and tried again. “That’s okay with me.”

Caleb nodded. “We’ll need to make preparations, then,” he said, and Jester was grateful for the briskness of his tone. “We need to purchase the materials, and the setup by itself will require extensive chalked diagrams, more than any other spell I’ve encountered. It will take a while to set up.”

“Where do we start?” Molly asked.

“The first thing we need,” Caleb said, “is a room with a bed.”

 

-

 

They decided to rent an additional room for the night.

Beau and Jester pulled the room’s single heavy wooden bed out from against the wall, and Caleb spent the rest of the afternoon with his battered spellbook open and chalk smudged on his coat, drawing pentagrams and half-circles within circles and anchoring the three corners of the large triangle around the bed with the opals Molly had bought from the jeweler a couple blocks over.

Jester had an uneasy sort of feeling in her stomach, alternating between a giddy sort of nervousness and a creeping sense of dread, whenever she looked at the bed with the chalk lines of the spell swirling ominously outward from it. The whole process seemed so _formal_ , like Mom had always told her that the ceremony where she’d lost her virginity had been, at the beginning of her life as the Ruby of the Sea. Because sure, Jester liked sex and all that, but not like _this_. And Fjord was super hot, and such a nice guy! She definitely wanted him to, you know, be okay afterwards, and not end up leaving the Mighty Nein and decide to go live in a warlock monastery, or wherever it was that a guy like Fjord, having discovering boning was awful and that he hated the very sight of the person he’d been forced to have sex with for ritualistic purposes, would flee to.

Fjord was conspicuously absent, having disappeared after volunteering himself for de-virginating duty, and hadn’t been around since then. That made Jester feel weird, too.

 

-

 

Fjord walked back into the tavern a couple hours later with wet hair, a somber expression, and a faintly unpleasant seawater smell clinging to him.

“And that’s the bathhouse for you,” Molly said firmly, and corralled Fjord along to the tavern’s single room for bathing, a plain affair of a room at the back of the building that was best summed up with the lackluster word _economical_. The two of them re-appeared thirty minutes or so later, Molly laughing as they walked through the door; Fjord still wasn’t smiling, but he seemed a little lighter, perhaps. Fjord looked around the common room of the tavern and caught Jester’s eye briefly before following Mollymauk upstairs.

Beau sipped her ale, watching Jester closely. “So you’re really going to do this.”

“I mean, I guess so. Yeah. Yes.”

“You’re killing me with the confidence here.”

“I’m not sure why Fjord picked you when he could have picked somebody like Caleb.” Nott took another swig from her flask and added, primly, “Caleb is _very_ handsome.”

“I’m sure he has his reasons,” Beau said, still watching Jester. “Are you okay? I know that you… like Fjord.”

Jester looked down at her hands. “Who doesn’t like Fjord? He’s a likeable guy.”

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

“Liquid courage?” Nott asked, and held her flask out to Jester.

“I mean, it’s a day for firsts, I guess,” Jester said, and Nott poured out a measure of the alcohol. “Cheers.”

“Bottom’s up,” Nott said, and Beau raised her pint as well.

Jester tipped the shot back, and started coughing. “You drink _this_?” she gasped, her voice tight with the unpleasant burn down the back of her throat.

Nott bared her teeth in a sharp grin. “Every day.”

Beau wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and the three slipped into a momentary, comfortable silence.

“I’ll be back,” Jester said, pushing back from the wooden table, and stood to follow Molly and Fjord upstairs.

“We’ll be here,” Nott said, and Beau tipped a salute with her glass.

Jester headed up the stairs, and turned right to follow a short hallway to the door of the room that Molly and Fjord shared. The door was cracked open a sliver, but she hesitated outside, unsure of what she wanted to say to Fjord. What _could_ she say in a situation like this?

“- doesn’t really matter, you know,” Molly’s voice said, coming into focus behind the door. “Because, ideally, you don’t end up wearing anything at all.”

Jester couldn’t make out Fjord’s response, muffled by the door.

There was a silence, then a couple words spoken too quietly for Jester to hear, and Molly laughed. Jester gave up all pretense of accidental eavesdropping and crouched down low, pressing her ear closer to the infinitesimal gap in the doorway, curling her tail up behind her.

Molly’s voice came into focus again. “- questions?”

There was another silence, and then, “If there’s something I need to know about tieflings in particular, I’d be obliged.”

“Don’t pull around on her horns. Unless she asks you to, in which case, yank around to your heart’s content. You can touch our tails, though. It’s just another appendage to us.”

A pause, and then Fjord barked a laugh, short and sharp. “I get it.”

Molly’s voice was sly. “Just thought I’d demonstrate what you’ll be dealing with.”

There was the scrape of footsteps on the staircase behind her; Jester scrambled away from the door and fled back down the hallway to her own room, her heart beating fast. She escaped into the empty room she shared with Beau and Nott and sat on the bedspread, staring out of the window, alone for the first time all day. It was cloudy and dark outside, the grey sky threatening rain.

Jester closed her eyes and tried not to think about it.

 

-

 

Caleb found her a short time later, and brought her to the room they’d rented for the night. Fjord stood just outside of the chalked arcane lines surrounding the bed. He watched her enter with an inscrutable expression.

Caleb cleared his throat.

“There is one final preparation we need to make. The symbols around the bed,” Caleb gestured at the pentagrams and semi-circles chalked in white onto the tavern bedroom’s wooden floor, “need to be inked or painted on your arms as well. I believe it connects you to the spell, and directs the magical auras, as things between the two of you - progress. I would like to suggest that we might use your paints to do this, Jester.”

Jester frowned. “I don’t know. I think I’d have to ask the Traveler?”

“By all means, please do.”

“Um, okay.” Jester looked again at Fjord, who was standing next to her with his hands behind his back, not saying anything. “I’ll just ask him then.”

“We’ll give you a moment,” Caleb said, and gestured to Fjord to follow, leaving her alone. Jester picked her way across the chalked design on the floor and sat down on the edge of the bed.

She closed her eyes.

“Dear Traveler,” she whispered, “so I’m about to do it with Fjord, who is the super hot guy I told you about who I sort of have a crush on, because we need to defeat a lady sea monster who wrecks ships and eats people and ensnares men with her song. And also Beau. Beau was like, super into the siren too, which really only left Nott and me, which sucked a lot. So Caleb asked if we could use my paints for this spell we’re doing, because we don’t have another way to kill this siren, but I wanted to ask you about it first, because those are my paints that I use to tell you all about my day, and I didn’t know if it would be weird or not? And you’re, like, my best friend, so.”

She paused, and heard only silence.

“Oh, and have I mentioned he’s super hot? Like, he’s basically Oskar, only not fictional and he doesn’t have tusks and he doesn’t wear his shirts half-unbuttoned in a sexy way, even though he totally should. Also, I’m not sure he actually really wants to have sex with me, but this siren is wrecking, like, a bunch of ships, so we’re not sure what else to do.”

A warm, fond feeling, edged with laughter, drifted through her mind.

“Okay,” she said, and touched the warm metal solidness of the symbol of the Traveler that she wore. “Okay, okay, okay. I’ll tell you all about it afterwards, I promise.”

 

-

 

“So the Traveler is okay with you doing this?” Fjord asked, which was the first thing he’d said directly to her in hours, since making his choice earlier in the tavern room. Fjord was shirtless, and having yellow and blue and teal swirls painted on his upper arms by a very serious Caleb, wielding a paintbrush like he’d never touched one before in his life.

Fjord looked pretty great without a shirt on.

“Oh, yeah, totally. He was all like, _go get it, girl!_ , and I was like, _okay, Traveler_.” Jester felt like this explanation needed more context; she desperately wanted everybody to know how great the Traveler was. “He’s cool like that.”

Fjord frowned. “Your god said _go get it, girl_ to you.”

“I mean - paraphrasing, but basically, yeah. He definitely said that.”

“Stop moving,” Caleb said, and started in on a vine up Fjord’s left bicep.

Jester had stripped off her overdress and skirt, while Fjord and Caleb both valiantly looked elsewhere, leaving her in her bodice, shift, stockings, and boots. Molly was painting the same swirls and wave patterns on her. The paintbrush tickled as it moved over her elbows.

Jester craned her head around to look at the patterns he was drawing. “You’re really good at this, Molly.”

Molly flourished the paintbrush like a sword trick. “I aim to please.”

There was silence as Caleb and Molly continued on with their work.

“There,” Caleb said finally. “I think that does it.”

Fjord looked down at himself. “It looks good,” he said. His arms were covered in wavy bits of pattern and colorful swirls, which crept up to the top of his shoulders and wrapped around the bones of his wrists, leaving his hands bare. He stretched his arms up over his head. The patterning slid over the muscles of his shoulders and biceps.

Caleb was silent for a long moment, cleaning off Jester’s brushes. “It will go well,” Caleb said finally, speaking directly to Fjord, and Jester wondered what he’d be saying if she wasn’t in the room right now. “I feel that this will go well.”

Fjord inclined his head in a silent answer.

Molly dabbed definitively at Jester’s shoulder and flipped the brush in his hand. “And you’re done too.”

“It’s pretty,” she said, and twirled her wrists around this way and that to watch the intricate pattern Molly had painted twist and stretch. “Thank you.”

“There is one last thing I need to do before we start, to activate the spell,” Caleb said. “Are the two of you ready?”

Jester looked at Fjord, who nodded, once.

“Please sit on the bed, then, both of you.”

Jester followed Fjord to the center of the room, walking carefully between the chalked lines on the floor again. Caleb took a stumpy piece of chalk out of his pocket and knelt, then drew a single connecting line between two curls that formed the stylized arm of a pentagram on the ground.

There was a moment of silence, blank and eerie, as the lines connected and the noise of the tavern below them skipped and fell away, then a loud clap of air and sound, like a wave coming in to fill the gap where water had once been. The short hairs on Jester’s neck stood up on end.

“There,” said Caleb. “It is done. And now we will… leave the two of you… to it.”

“Sweet dreams, children,” Molly said, and bowed as he left.

Caleb closed the door behind him, leaving Jester and Fjord alone.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again to my amazing beta readers, masonjo and blackestglass!

Fjord sat beside her on the bed. Jester scuffed her boots against the floor, kicking her legs, feeling a bit ridiculous in her full stockings and heavy boots. The paint on her arms was starting to itch as it dried; raindrops made soft pops as they hit the window.

“Are you -”

“I have to -” Fjord said at the same time, then cut himself off. “My apologies. You first.”

Jester took a deep breath. “Are you okay with this? Because you don’t have to, you know. We can find another way. That’s what we’re good at: we improvise, we figure things out. We find another way.”

“I was going to ask you the same thing.”

“Me?”

“I didn’t give you a choice, after all. I just blurted out your name.” And how ridiculous that he, of all people, felt like he was the one giving her no choice.

“I volunteered.”

“Peer pressure.”

“Um. Well. Not, like, completely.”

“Right.” He cleared his throat. “Well… okay, then.”

There had to be a way to solve this problem without totally scarring Fjord for life. There just _had_ to be.

She could... she wondered if -

“Can I blow you?” Jester asked. Right! She’d give Fjord a blowjob, and then neither of them had to feel weird about anything at all, and maybe she’d go back up her room afterwards and hope Beau and Nott both fell asleep quickly so she could get herself off later, because blowing Fjord was going to be _super_ hot. It was the perfect solution, really.

Next to her on the bed, Fjord started coughing. She thumped him on the back.

“You want to - “

“ _Blow you_ ,” she repeated, and mimed a little, helpfully. “You know, like, suck your dick?”

“I know what that means,” he said in a choked tone, staring at her for a long moment before turning his head away. “Would that fulfill the requirements of the spell?”

“Maybe? But I don’t know, maybe it’s a dumb, crusty, old fashioned spell, so, maybe not, in that case.”

“Well then, do we want to chance it?” And come on, what guy in the history of ever had tried to talk his way out of a _blowjob_?

“I mean,” she pointed out logically, “I could always suck you off and if that doesn’t work, we move on to boning at that point.”

Fjord opened his mouth, then shut it again.

“Well? What do you think?”

“What if - “ Fjord said, sounding strangled, “- what if we start with something simpler, instead?”

“Like what?”

“Like… kissing.” He summoned up a smile that Jester was pretty sure he meant to be reassuring, but she wasn’t quite sure which of them he was supposed to reassure. “I’ve done that before.”

“I like kissing.”

“Well,” he said. “That sounds mighty fine, then.”

She moved in closer to him, lowering her voice. “I _really_ like kissing.”

And so he kissed her.

The kiss was awkward, in the way that unpracticed kisses can be; Jester opened her mouth just as Fjord tried to turn his head and their lips slipped together, teeth bumping. But still, it was _Fjord_ , and Jester’s head went funny and light at the thought.

A shimmer folded into existence in the corner of Jester’s eye.

Fjord broke the kiss, looking up, as a glow twined itself up invisible scaffolding past the edge of the bed. A magical shield bloomed over their heads, webbed with veins of silvery-brightness and strung with iridescent purples and pearl blues, like the opals that Molly had bought for the spell that anchored the three corners of the triangle chalked on the floor.

“Oh! This must be Caleb’s spell.” Jester touched the shimmer that now surrounded them like a bubble with a single finger, and it clung to her like water parting around a stone in a stream. Opalescent silver beaded on her skin. “It’s _beautiful_.”

Jester looked back at Fjord, and the light from the shield reflected in undulating waves on his face. His green skin and the pearl glow made Jester feel like they were both underwater, the spell rippling gently around them.

“It’s like being the under the ocean or something,” she said.

Some strange emotion shifted in Fjord’s expression. “I suppose it is.”

“Is this because we’re doing this spell to kill a siren? A water creature?”

Fjord didn’t answer.

Caleb’s spell pulsed warmly above them in waves of silver and pearl, but Fjord’s gaze was distant now. She reached up to touch one of the yellow-ish swirls Caleb had painted on Fjord’s shoulders that curled up against his collarbone, and he shivered. Jester wondered if he was thinking of all the ships that the siren had wrecked against unforgiving cliffs; if he was thinking of his own near-drowning, his narrow escape from a ship that would never sail the ocean again.

“Fjord?”

Before Jester could say anything more, he kissed her again, harder, and slipped his tongue into her mouth. It was better this time. Jester only had a moment to think that he seemed like he was aiming to distract her from their current conversation before deciding she was perfectly fine with being distracted.

Fjord tasted like salt and the sea. It made Jester feel strangely homesick. She pushed Fjord onto his back, getting on top of him so that she was straddling him, then leaned down to lose herself in kissing him, to chase the unsettling feeling away.

Jester squirmed a bit against Fjord’s stomach, mimicking the heady feeling of their lips sliding together with the rest of her body, and Fjord made a rough sort of noise she’d never heard from him before, deep in his throat. Then he hooked one of his arms over her shoulders to cup the back of her head with one large hand, hauling her in closer to hold her tight against his body. She had a brief thought for the beautiful patterns painted on Fjord’s arms, smearing as he pressed her up against her body.

She’d been so right, though; Fjord was pretty great to make out with.

“You’re pretty great to make out with!” she gasped a short while later.

Fjord was breathing hard, staring up at her, and he didn’t say anything for a long moment. “You’re not half bad yourself,” he said finally, in a passable drawl, and Jester grinned.

She sat up, knees on either side of Fjord’s hips, and gestured to the laced front of her bodice. “Can you help me take this off?”

“I reckon I can.” His fingers tripped awkwardly over her breasts, tugging at the laces, before soldiering on and helping her pull the bodice off, leaving Jester in her chemise.

“You next!” she said, and scooted back to sit on Fjord’s thighs as she worked at the heavy buckle of his belt. She slipped the belt out from underneath his body and flung it cheerfully outside of the chalked diagrams surrounding the bed.

But she hesitated at the buttoned flap of his pants, suddenly aware that Fjord wasn’t helping her, like every other person she’d ever done this with - instead he was just _lying there_ , letting her do this to him, watching with an expression Jester couldn’t decipher. 

Because: Fjord didn’t want to be here, with her, in the first place.

Right.

She’d forgotten that fact for a moment, thrumming with the good feeling of kissing somebody she desperately liked. She wished suddenly, and with a selfish little stab of self-pity, that what was happening here was something other than it what actually was.

She pulled her hands back slowly, and moved to sit next to Fjord on the bed instead.

Jester leaned over to unlace her boots, looking down to hide her expression, and Fjord copied the motion, bending to the task of his own boots and undoing the buckles across his calves. After a moment’s thought, Jester took a deep breath and kicked off her boots, laying her stockinged right leg across Fjord’s thigh; he’d been doing pretty well with undressing her earlier. That still seemed safe.

“Help me with my stockings?”

Fjord put a hand on her knee. Her stockings were a functional woolen brown, to cover the sins of hard travel and infrequent laundering, and not nearly as fine as what she’d been used to, before.

Fjord examined her leg like a puzzle, where her stockings disappeared underneath the short hemline of her dress-like shift. Jester pulled up her chemise to show him the blue bit of ribbon that wove through the cuff of the stockings that she tied off in neat bows every morning, below the cuffs of her drawers. If she couldn’t have silk stockings anymore, at least the ribbon was cute.

He undid the knot with blunt fingers. He lingered a breathless moment on her thigh before he tightened his mouth, looked very heroic and determined about it, and rolled the rest of the stocking down her leg.

Jester swung her other leg, still stockinged, up into Fjord’s lap, and he repeated the process, leaving her with bare legs.

She sat back and cheerfully wiggled her toes, enjoying the feeling, then traced circles against both her wrists. Magic unfurled between her palms; she rotated the spellwork like mechanical gears before bringing the insides of her wrists together to touch. Ford watched her curiously, his hand still resting on her knee, as though forgotten.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m making sure I don’t have a BA-BY.” She turned the magical aura neatly between her hands.

“Oh. Right. Did your, ah, mother teach you that spell?”

“Yes.” The spell glowed red, bright and brief, and then sunk into her skin, and she felt the familiar flush of warmth. “I mean, I’m assuming you don’t want little blueish-green babies with super cute tails running around.”

“No. No, of course not. I just hadn’t thought about it. I’d assumed - I’ve heard of sailors wearing sheaths and the like, but not anything like that.” He rubbed his thumb back and forth against her leg. “Your mother does magic?”

“Oh, a little bit, here and there. It’s part of what makes her, you know,” Jester fluttered her hands, “the Ruby of the Sea. Along with how she has sex with people for money, and is, like, really, really beautiful, and how everybody loves to talk to her, and how she sings so pretty it’s like something inside your heart breaks into a million tiny pieces.”

“She sounds like quite a woman.” He sounded distracted, and she realized that Fjord was slowly circling his fingers around her knee now, tracing the skin there.

“She is.”

Fjord continued to trace patterns on her leg. His expression was distant and his eyes were darker than normal.

He didn’t say anything for some time. Jester squirmed.

“Are you sure you don’t want that blowjob?” Jester asked hopefully.

Fjord turned an interestingly intense shade of green, opened his mouth, closed it, then tried again. “It doesn’t seem… fair.”

Drastic action was apparently in order: she sat up and crossed her arms to pull her shift up and off herself, exposing bare shoulders and her undergarments. “Would it help if I told you I _liked_ to suck dick?”

Fjord’s eyes flickered down to her naked stomach.

“I really do,” she continued, and leaned forward to put her mouth close to Fjord’s ear, lowering her voice. “I really, really do.”

“Good gods,” Fjord breathed.

“It’s the truth.”

“Okay.” His voice was tight.

“Okay? Like… okay, buddy, let’s do this?”

He swallowed. “I… yes. Okay. Yes.”

Jester dropped her hands to Fjord’s pants again, working the buttons there, and her fingers brushed up against the bulge underneath his trousers. “Awesome,” she said, and slowly, purposefully licked the skin behind Fjord’s ear. He shuddered.

Fjord was pretty hard up for it; his dick sprang up to his stomach, heavy and almost painfully erect, once Jester got the buttons undone. He stared at her as Jester’s hand wrapped around the base of his cock, jaw slack, and his attention was something hot and bright that Jester basked in.

“You can come in my mouth, if you want.” She leaned over to swirl her tongue around the head of his dick, pulling off with a loud, cheerful smack. Fjord’s stomach muscles clenched. “It’s easier like that, you know. Less mess.”

Fjord didn’t say anything to that, but his eyes went a bit glassy.

Jester played a bit around a bit more with the head of his cock before taking pity on the guy. Fjord’s dick was awesome, thick and hefty and too big for her to completely take in her mouth; she tried to relax her throat muscles like she’d been taught, but she’d never been very good at that part.

Fjord’s palm came up to cradle the side of her head, his fingers tangling in her short blue hair.

The world around them darkened as the spell came to life, intensifying the light from the glowing shield that encircled them like a dome, and ripples of silver light undulated around them. She curled her tongue up underneath the bottom part of his dick, bringing pressure as she kept him in her mouth, and his grip convulsed in her hair, and oh, fuck, this whole thing was _super hot_.

Jester started to move up and down on his dick, tightening her fist around the base of his cock, where her mouth didn’t reach. She was sprawled between Fjord’s legs on the bed; she snuck her other hand down between her legs to press the heel of her hand against herself.

She looked up to see Fjord staring down the bed at her, panting heavily. He snapped his eyes away as soon as he noticed her watching, like she’d caught him doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing.

Jester ground down harder against her own hand.

It happened fast; Fjord was overwhelmed and gasping unintelligibly, and he came with a harsh gasp, his hand tightening in the bedspread next to his hip. Jester kept on him as he came, riding hard against the head of his cock as he shuddered.

"Fuck," Fjord said, throwing a hand back over his eyes. "Good god damn."

Jester stealthily snuck both hands up where Fjord could see them again, then propped her head on her chin, watching him.

"Yeah?"

" _Yes_ ," he replied emphatically.

The spell still surrounded them, pulsing darkly with silvers and purples and blues like a living thing.

"Well," she said, not really disappointed, "it looks like the spell isn't letting us go free yet." She pulled herself up the bed next to Fjord, who was breathing rapidly. "So get ready for round two, I guess."

Fjord laughed, and there was something desperate and unhinged in the noise. “Give me a couple minutes.”

Jester propped herself up on an elbow, looking at him, trying to decide how literal he was being. His dick was still hard, although perhaps not as painfully as before. Maybe… “You only need a couple minutes? Is that for real?”

“I mean, give or take, yeah,” he muttered, his hand still covering his eyes. “That’s for real.”

"Okay, wow. Okay, okay, okay. I've never had sex with a half-orc before, but Mama always said orcs had,” she put on the beautiful, fancy accent of her mother, “ _tremendous sexual prowess_."

Fjord dropped his hand a bit to glance sideways at her. "The Ruby of the Sea said that?”

Jester nodded.

“And I thought I’d never be happy to be half-orc,” he said, like it was a joke or something, but there was an uncomfortably raw cut of truth in his voice. 

Jester slid her naked leg up a little higher where she was draped over him, her knee close to his erection, and Fjord groaned. His fingers tightened on her hip.

“I am - “ Fjord started, then cut off whatever he’d meant to say and repeated, “Give me a couple minutes.”

“Okay,” she said, and played her fingers idly against Fjord’s stomach instead, trying not to fidget too much.

Fjord’s breathing evened out a little bit. He seemed unconcerned with his ongoing erection, so Jester forced herself to ignore it as well, as best she could; the heavy length of Fjord’s cock just hanging out in bed with the two of them like a somehow-neutral third party.

“Was that your first blowjob?” she asked.

He hesitated, then nodded yes.

“Did I -” she held her fingers up to her temple and then exploded them outward, “- blow your mind?”

“You could say that,” he said, recovered enough to be a bit wry.

She cracked a smile. “Awesome.”

Fjord’s fingers began to move again, following the curves of her hip. Jester felt restless and turned on - she sort of wished she could ask Fjord to go down on her as well, but it didn’t seem right. She sat up and took off her chest binds instead, unwrapping the cloth.

Jester plopped down next to Fjord again, and he rolled to face her on the bed. It took Jester a moment to realize he was totally, definitely checking her out.

Jester faked an exaggerated yawn, and lifted an arm up over her head to arch her back as she did so, sucking in her stomach and sticking her breasts out.

His fingers twitched against her hip. “Subtle, Jester.”

Jester reached down to move Fjord’s hand up to her breast, pressing his palm against her nipple. He sucked in a sharp breath.

“I thought you wanted subtle.”

“Do you even know the definition of the word?” Despite the flippant question his voice was thick, lower than it normally was. He was staring at his hand on her breast.

Jester shimmied out of her drawers. “Maybe not.”

Fjord drew his hand slowly down her breast, his mouth slack.

“Do you want to have sex now?” she asked, hopefully.

His dick twitched against his stomach.

“Sure,” he said, sort of casual but also not casual at all.

They ended up with Fjord on top. Jester was unsure if that was precisely the best way to go about things, all things considered, but everybody figured out how to get it in at some point because people kept making babies whether they meant to or not, so.

After some fumbling and a bit of helpful rearranging he began to press into her, holding his dick with one hand and feeling his way tentatively forward. Jester always really liked this part: the first moments of sex, that first full ache of connection. Iridescent light flickered across the bed like shadows across water as Fjord moved, the magic around them spilling light.

The spell started to whine, pressing down around both of them.

Jester tilted her hips, and Fjord pushed in all the way, and oh, gods, it felt so _good_. Fjord made a strange, broken sort of noise, low and soft and private in her ear. He was breathing fast now, the muscles in his neck straining.

The symbols painted around both of their arms started to glow.

A magical aura pulsed through the room then, bright and victorious, and Jester felt something large and terrifying break open around them, like curtains thrown back from a window, allowing full sunlight in, dazzling and too bright. Everything around them shifted.

The spell blazed around them, and Jester _felt_ it for the first time, sharp and sudden, pressing down on her mind.

An immense, foreign exhilaration began to batter her thoughts - she understood dimly that the thick sense of triumph suffocating her mind must be the spell, feeding on whatever it needed from Fjord’s sacrifice, but it was hard to think under the emotions the magic was dredging up within her. She gasped, trying to fight, but the spell was strong and the killing magic it conjured was deep and powerful and old.

White dust lifted in the air around the bed and started to spiral around the vortex of the spell, following the arcane symbols that Caleb had chalked on the floor.

“Jester,” Fjord spoke close to her ear, “what is happen -”

His voice cut off abruptly, and Jester groaned as the spell slammed into her mind, and the emotions she was feeling shifted and blurred.

Fjord didn’t move as the spell took hold, the two of them frozen ridiculously in the middle of sex. His hands convulsed, digging painfully into her hips. And she felt it then, from Fjord’s point of view: how his fingers felt pressing against her skin, the tight, hot grip of her body, how he’d never thought in a million years that sex was something like _this_ , this onslaught of sensations pulling him under, it must be the spell, gods, it was like nothing he’d ever -

Jester snapped her head to the side and blinked, coming back into her own thoughts.

“Fjord,” she said desperately, speaking the words out loud, “the spell - I can hear your -”

“I know,” he gasped, and it took Jester a long moment to realize that the words he’d just spoken sounded different; his accent was not the lazy drawl she was used to, but rather something both posher and crisper. “Jester, I can feel - I can feel what you’re -”

The spell slammed into both of them again.

Fjord’s mind swirled around Jester, emotions that were not her own curling around her thoughts - a stifling sense of loss and fear and a long, arduous journey set apart from the world, and a deep, relentless hunger underneath it all, a drive to consume, and a want so vast and tangled and foreign that she couldn’t understand how it was focused on her, right here, in this single moment.

And she felt thoughts and memories being pulled unwillingly out of herself - her relationship with the Traveler, the way she felt his grace deep in her heart and held onto it like a selfish prayer; the loneliness and emptiness and lost, dull time of a life lived in isolation. She tried to scramble it all back inside of herself, to hold onto her sense of self with sheer strength of will, but it slipped from her like water through her fingers.

White chalk floated in eerie patterns behind Fjord’s shoulder, the light of the room silvery and beating slowly with darkness around them.

“Move,” she said, and racked her fingers uselessly across Fjord’s shoulders, slick with sweat, finding no purchase. “You need to move, we have to finish this.”

Fjord shuddered, gritting his teeth, and dropped his forehead against her and started to fuck her.

The doubled-up sensation was terrifyingly intense; Jester arched her head back, seeking any sort of relief from the pressure building between them. She could feel what both herself and Fjord were experiencing, the open conduit between them overwhelming her mind.

“Jester,” Fjord gasped, still speaking in that same high-brow accent.

He was fucking her fast now, his mind bleeding desperation. The spell rang in her ears as the tension inside her peaked and broke for the first time, and she fell into the orgasm with wild relief. That was strange in and of itself; normally she didn’t come just from this act itself.

And she _felt_ it as Fjord, as it happened: her body tight and shuddering around the length of his cock; how terribly, intensely, frighteningly good it felt. Fjord’s thoughts were incoherent and frantic, almost panicked, as he sought something just out of his reach.

Jester hooked a leg up over Fjord, and the change in position had him hitting somewhere deeper inside of her still. She felt it like an ache, uncomfortably intense, like pressing on an old bruise. Fjord groaned, noisy and messy.

Everything was too much, far too much; Jester sought out Fjord’s mouth with her own. He kissed her back with teeth and tongues and spit as they tried to outrun the spell driving them onward.

“Fjord,” Jester tried, the word almost a sob. She had to help him, had to bring him over the edge, had to end this for both of them. “Fjord, you need to come. Come now.”

“I… don’t…” Fjord struggled with the words, and she felt the strain within him, the great effort racking his entire body.

“Please, Fjord.”

“I can’t -”

“ _Now_.”

The world went white, and Jester felt herself swept helplessly along in the wake of Fjord’s orgasm, his hands heavy on her hips. His eyes were screwed shut, panting, his face twisted up with something intense and primitive. The magical aura around them flickered red for the first time, the color of sacrifice and blood.

The ringing in Jester’s ears grew louder as she came, dragged along by the emotions spilling out of Fjord.

Jester’s thoughts were thick and heavy, hardly her own, and it took her a long moment to realize that although she’d thought the spell might subside, when she opened her eyes the chalk dust still floated in strange, arcane patterns around them. The spell glowed deep and angry, like crimson spilled in the depth of the ocean. There was no daylight coming in from the window from the outside world, only darkness.

And Fjord was was still moving in her, still hard, despite having come. Jester felt raw and oversensitized; the friction of Fjord’s dick inside of her almost painful now. The same desperation as before still leaked from Fjord’s thoughts, and her hips moved frantically, helplessly, to match him.

Jester felt undone, disconnected from her body, come dripping out of her as Fjord continued to fuck her, pooling onto the bedspread between her legs. Fjord’s thoughts were a barrage, a high whine in her head.

Fjord mumbled something Jester didn’t understand, and bared his teeth against her neck. She heard an echo of the words in her mind, in Fjord’s voice, in that strange, precise accent he’d spoken in before.

Jester’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she came again.

The patterns painted on Fjord’s arms and curling up onto his wide shoulders glowed, mirroring the spell surrounding them. Threads of dark red moved among the colors despite no red paint having been used.

Fjord groaned, moving, fucking her, the whole thing too intense, too much, the world spiralling wildly around both of them. An unnatural darkness sank in from the spell surrounding them, shot through with the crimson glow of blood. And she’d never known sex to be like this; she wasn’t precisely sure this exactly was sex, at least the way she’d been taught. Fjord’s mind bled into her own. The intimacy was unbearable, it was indecent, their thoughts laid bare to each other and entwined when they shouldn’t be.

She dimly felt Fjord’s mouth at her breast. He came a second time choking on her body.

White burned through the air then, the chalk dust that had been floating around them frozen and still. The sudden light scorched an afterimage on Jester’s eyes of something arcane and powerful she didn’t fully understand.

And, as suddenly as it had started: it also ended.

Silence rushed in around them, followed closely by the everyday, common sounds of the tavern room underneath them: the shout of a raised voice, the clicking of bottles, the comfortable murmur of evening conversation. She felt the spell shift and dissipate. The shimmering light around them dropped away; the room faded into the blackness of regular night.

Fjord was hard inside of her, but he had stopped moving. He was breathing frantically, his face buried in her neck.

A few stars were visible outside the single, thickly-paned window. There was no sign of the chalked lines on the floor surrounding the bed anymore, or of the opals that had anchored the corners of the spell. The room was bare except for the bed again, the floor rough and wooden.

The painted symbols on both of their arms was also gone. Jester found her hand on Fjord’s naked arm, feeling bare skin.

 _Sleep_.

Jester felt a great weight lift from her mind, and exhaustion rushed in to take its place, thick and heavy. She had a spare thought that she should speak with Fjord and make sure he was okay, that she should check that they were both okay, but an unnatural, heavy sleep pulled her under before she could summon the energy to form the words.

The command blanketed her mind, and she was powerless to resist.

She fell asleep with Fjord still hard inside of her, her tail wrapped around his leg.


	3. Chapter 3

The ocean was brilliant, azure and indigo shading to black depths as a vast, unseen world passed by underneath their small boat. Jester thought that she would never really get used to being on the actual sea; she’d sailed twice now, and the idyllic horizon of water outside her window growing up, the scent of salt on the wind, had not prepared her for the hugeness and emptiness of the physical ocean, the brutal reality of it, how it teemed and roiled with alien life underneath her feet.

Fjord readied the ropes at the back of the boat for landing, gazing out over the horizon. He’d been gone when she woke up this morning, clothes and boots picked up from the floor around the bed, and he’d scarce looked at her twice while everybody had decided they needed to visit the siren’s island in order to verify if the spell had worked or not.

Beau sat down next to her, running her hand rhythmically over her staff, back and forth.

“So,” Beau said, and raised an eyebrow.

“So,” Jester said.

Beau couldn’t seem to figure out what to say next; the whole group had been awkward and deferential with Fjord and Jester all morning, dancing around the unspoken subject. “How are you?” Beau finally settled on, and seemed pretty pleased with her social acumen.

They were coming up fast on the siren’s island, the rocky cliffs rising above the ocean like a jagged fist, the walls steep and terrible. Nott was huddled in the back of the boat, drunk and resentful about being forced onto yet another boat.

“Fine,” Jester said. “I’m good. It was… fine. You know, good? Sex is good.” She felt lost - how could she even start to explain what had happened last night? She wasn’t sure she understood enough of it herself to even start to try.

“...Sex is good?” Beau repeated, apparently hearing more in the words than Jester had meant to say.

“I mean, yeah.” Jester glanced back once again at Fjord, and a strange feeling ghosted uneasily up the back of her neck. “Totally. Right?”

“I think that’s for you to say.”

“Then I say it was good,” Jester said, and Beau pressed her lips together.

They were floating over shipwrecks right now, drifting over a vast, unmarked graveyard of drowned men and women. Jester caught the symbol of the Traveler in her hand and pressed it against her chest. She could only hope that they’d actually managed to kill the siren, and that Fjord’s sacrifice had been worth it.

Gulls swirled above the cliffs, white dotting the rocky outcroppings where scattered pockets of some sort of hearty, yellow-ish sea grass grew. From a distance the island seemed no different than it had two days ago, when Caleb had nearly died, bleeding out on the floor of the siren’s lair, and they’d only made it out due to sheer, dumb luck.

Molly drew his swords, the blades glinting in the sunlight, as they reached the shore. Beau took a firmer grip on her staff, and Fjord twisted his wrist and the falchion appeared, sliding into reality, seawater dripping from the edge and barnacles entwined along the hilt.

They had agreed that Nott and Jester would scout up front, so Jester took the lead with Nott trailing a few steps behind her, crossbow out. The rest of the group followed at a short distance back from the two of them. The small, rocky island supported little beyond the simplest life, a few rats that lived among the stone boulders and the never ending cacophony of seabirds as they circled.

Jester approached the siren’s cave cautiously, listening for any hint of enchanted song. The only sounds were the wind against the cliffs, the scream of gulls, and the ever-present roar of the sea.

They found the siren dead in her nest, one taloned hand clutching her throat.

“Well,” Molly said, and sheathed his scimitars, staring down at the beast. “How about that.”

 

-

 

Caleb scryed for magical residues within the lair while Nott, Beau, and Molly searched for anything worth looting. The three were examining a huge saltwater pearl found in the siren’s nest, unevenly textured and crusted with a thick mud, when Jester realized that Fjord wasn’t there anymore.

She found him on the edge of a cliff outside the mouth of the cave, staring off into the distance over the ocean. She came to stand next to Fjord.

Fjord swung the falchion idly about. The gem embedded in the hilt glinted strangely, catching sunlight and twisting it into something else, and she remembered the press within Fjord’s mind of something foreign and dark, in the same place she held the Traveler within herself. She wondered what he was carrying around inside of himself - if he saw that same strange, tangled darkness when he looked out at the ocean, at the beautiful, blue clear horizon spread out in front of them.

He caught her watching him and some expression flickered across his face too quickly for Jester to interpret. He snapped his wrist, and the falchion disappeared into whatever sideways place held it when Fjord had no use for it.

Seabirds clustered on the gunwale of their rented boat, beached on the shore at the bottom of the cliff underneath their feet, pecking fretfully at each other or dancing back and showing their wings in futile attempts at intimidation. Stupid seagulls.

“ _Hey!_ ” she yelled, and her voice boomed magically down over the ocean cliff. “Don’t poop on our boat, you dumb birds!”

Birds scattered from the seagull-crusted boat hull, raising a shrill, squawking panic. 

“That’ll learn ‘em,” Fjord said, next to her.

Jester sniffed, pretending impatience with the birds and like everything was perfectly normal between the two of them despite the fact that those were the first words Fjord had spoken to her all morning. “It better.”

“Sure enough.”

She was intensely, achingly aware of his presence: the shading of his skin from green to a softer golden at his jawline, the way he licked his lips, the glimpse of a pink tongue at the corner of his mouth. His calloused hands were large and flexed idly as he stood, and Jester remembered what his fingers had felt like on her skin, on her breasts. A hot feeling turned over inside of her, a potent combination of lust and something more slippery, like regret.

She cleared her throat, and turned to face him, gathering up her courage.

“So - so I woke up this morning, and you were gone, Fjord, and - and I felt really weird about it because I wanted to make sure that you were, like, okay -”

“ _Jester_.” His voice was quiet, almost pained. Jester continued on in a rush.

“- And then Beau was asking me how _I_ was and I didn’t know what to tell her, so I know it’s hard and all weird and stuff. But you can tell me anything, Fjord. I’ve seen you naked now, so, you know, you don’t have to be embarrassed about anything with me now. Anything at _all_.”

There was a cautious pause, and then, slowly, “Okay.”

“As in you’re okay? Or… you know.” She mimicked Fjord’s deeper voice. “ _Okay, Jester_. That kind of okay.”

“I’m... okay.” Fjord shifted. “And you? How are you?”

“Weird,” Jester said quickly. “I feel all weird and… weird.”

“You sure know how to flatter a guy.”

Jester flinched. Guilt sprouted in her chest, making it difficult to breathe.

“I’m sorry,” she said, because it was the only thing she had to offer him, and it was what she had really needed to say in the first place.

“It’s not your fault. You know it’s not your fault.”

“I don’t know. I feel like it’s _somebody’s_ fault, and I’m the obvious choice.”

“Let’s blame the siren who used her powers to drown hundreds of men and women. Blame the fact that evil exists in this world.” Fjord sighed. “Blame whatever perverted wizard figured out that having sex with a virgin would kill one of those monsters in the first place.”

Jester shook her head, then passed one of her hands over the other, and divine energy, the part of her connection to the Traveler that spawned killing spells, swarmed angrily between her palms before she slapped the nascent spell away. “I’m glad it’s dead.”

“Everybody is glad that thing is dead.”

He went back to staring out at the horizon, at the sea he was so intimately connected to. The seagulls were back on the boat, snapping at each other with sharp beaks.

“How can you be so calm about this?” she asked, finally.

His fingers tapped a rhythm on his thighs as he considered his answer. “What happened last night wasn’t all bad.” His tone was neutral; careful. “It wasn’t what I thought it would be, but it also wasn’t what you seem to think it was.”

“It wasn’t what I thought it would be, either,” Jester said. “I mean, it started out okay, I think, but everything sort of… changed, you know?”

Fjord eyed her, curiously.

“So that’s not how sex normally is?” The question was mild, but deceptively loaded - Jester could hear the studied casualness as he spoke.

“You know it’s not.” She kicked the dirt at her feet and it cascaded over the side of the cliff, hitting rock outcroppings as it filtered down toward the beach below. “It’s normally, like - more embarrassing and weird, but also fun and awesome? Like making out, times a thousand. Not - where you, like, read the other person’s mind and stuff.”

“So no psychic stuff. Normally.”

“Not really.”

“I figured that would be a thing people talked about, if that was the case,” he said, and Jester felt a deep swell of admiration for Fjord’s wry self-possession in the middle of a storm.

“And also monsters don’t normally die as a result of having had sex. That too.”

“Right.”

“No spell dome of light surrounds you while you do it.”

“Mmhmm.”

“Normally you can, you know, stop. If you want to.”

There was a longer pause. “Right.”

“And it’s - um.” Jester shook her head. “It’s not normally so - “ She didn’t have the language, she didn’t know how to even begin to explain what had actually happened to the two of them last night. “So… _heavy_.” She tried out the word carefully.

“Right,” Fjord repeated, more quietly this time.

How could she say this? “I’ve never had sex before that was - like that.”

“It was…” Fjord trailed off, looking uncomfortable for the first time. “It was _overwhelming_.” He spoke thickly, bleeding too much emotion into the single word.

Jester pressed the symbol of the Traveler hard against her palm, and her heart thumped hard and fast in her empty chest.

“I keep thinking about it,” he admitted, in a low, strange whisper, not looking at her again. “I can’t not think about it.”

She wanted to say _I heard your thoughts last night, I felt everything that you felt_ , but she looked at him, standing next to her in daylight, wearing his normal clothes and with the same faded scars he always had across his handsome face, and she faltered. What had happened wasn’t something he’d chosen to share with her; it was an imposition, on top of everything else. She wasn’t even sure how clearly he remembered everything, once the spell had taken hold.

“You know you don’t have to feel awkward with me,” she said instead. “You’re, like, my really, really good friend, and I know it’s all weird because we had to have this crazy magical sex but I am still your friend and I…” The words stuck in her throat. “I would feel terrible if…”

“Jester.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s okay,” he said, and his hand twitched at his side, like he was debating something. “The two of us, we’re okay.”

Jester swallowed.

“We’re okay?”

“We are.” Then, more firmly, “We are more than okay.”

His hand came up then, like he’d decided whatever he’d been debating before. He pushed back a bit of hair, tucking it behind her ear, and caught her eye, looking at her seriously.

A complicated, immense feeling unfurled inside of Jester, and she tried not to cry. She nodded her head, instead.

Fjord took her hand, and wrapped his fingers around her own. They stood together, holding hands, staring out at the ocean.

After a bit, Jester attempted a wobbly sort of smile. “So you liked the blowjob part?”

Fjord’s hand tightened around her own, squeezing her hand once, deliberately, and he dropped it again.

“I might have liked it,” he said, casually.

“Good.” Jester sniffed, rubbing her nose. “And I want you to know that I promise I’ll try not to think about you naked all the time, Fjord, even though it’s going to be super hard because you’re really, really handsome.”

“That’s… very kind of you.” Fjord hesitated, then cracked a small smile. “It’s going to be _hard_ , huh." He raised an eyebrow at her.

“Ha ha,” she said, but snickered a little for real too. It wasn’t like she didn’t know what Fjord was doing, but what could she say. It was funny.

They fell silent again after the small joke, but the silence felt a little easier this time.

“We need to leave this place,” Nott said, stomping up into the middle of their conversation from out of nowhere and crossing her arms over her chest. Fjord took a step away from her, but Nott didn’t appear to notice. “I hate it here. Islands are the worst.”

Caleb and Molly came out of the cave together, still arguing about the large pearl they’d found, and Beau parkoured up the side of the rock face that formed the cave that the siren had lived in, checking out the top of the rock formation to make sure that the entire island was clear. Caleb carried the severed head of the siren wrapped in thick layers of cloth, staining the fabric with a dark greenish-blue blood. 

Fjord swung the falchion into existence again.

“Guess it’s time to go fight some asshole birds for our boat,” he said grimly.

 

-

 

They collected the reward from the local authorities, who didn’t seem to know quite what to make of the mismatched group of adventurers who had dragged the scaled head of a siren into the local tavern an hour earlier. Jester attempted to message the Stubborn Stalk to let them know the results of their bounty, skirting in increasingly awkward ways around the actual mechanism of death. Three sent messages (and three very confused responses from Darrow) later, Caleb pulled out a sheet of paper and wrote out twenty five words and had Jester read the letter verbatim to an empty wall.

“You’re so boooooring, Caleb,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“I prefer the term efficient.”

“Bor-ing,” she repeated.

Caleb smiled, and bought her a drink.

Beau paid for a round of drinks for the entire bar, which had grown increasingly full as the evening set in, shouting “The Mighty Nein!” with a tankard in her hand. About half the bar repeated the words back to her in a somewhat confused fashion, raising their own pints. Nott drank from her flask sitting against the back wall, watching the crowd with sharp eyes, as a ramshackle band took shape in the corner of the tavern, playing jigs and shanties for tips.

Molly was a whirlwind on the floor, pulling barmaids and sailors alike into his orbit, dancing with them all, while Fjord sat on the sideline nursing an ale, uncharacteristically quiet.

Caleb pulled Jester into a sloppy, fast reel after a couple of drinks. He had been trained in etiquette and knew the court dances, like the fancier of her mom’s suitors, but tripped over his own feet attempting a common reel as they whirled wildly around the bar. There was a flush of appealingly boyish color high on his cheeks by the end of the song, and the tips of his ears were red from exertion and alcohol. They collapsed on the bench next to Nott when they were done, where Jester rescued her skirts from utter disarray as Caleb stared at the ceiling above them, breathing fast.

“That was fun,” she said, and patted him on the shoulder. “Thanks, Caleb.”

“Caleb is a fantastic dancer,” Nott said. “He’s the best.”

“Well, I am not sure that that is true,” Caleb said, in the half-embarrassed way he had. “But if there is anything else I can - help you with, Jester,” he glanced from Jester over to Fjord, who was absently playing his finger around the rim of his tankard, “you will let me know, yes?”

“Oh.” Jester looked over at Fjord as well. “Sure. Of course.”

“Hey, you want to cut a rug with me, Nott?” Beau asked, appearing next to the three of them with a drink in her hand.

“ _Cut a rug_?” Nott repeated, aghast, her voice rising to a shriek. “Just because Jester and Fjord had sex doesn’t mean this whole group is going to be some sort of - _swinging sexual orgy_ from this point on.”

“What?” Beau looked more than a little confused and alarmed. “No. I meant… cut a rug. Like, _dance_ , Nott. Do you want to _dance_ with me.”

“Oh.” Nott sat up a little straighter, and inclined her chin grandly. “Yes, I’ll dance.”

“Did somebody say orgy?” Molly asked, swinging up to the group with one of the barkeeps, red-cheeked and laughing, as his dance partner. “I could have sworn I heard somebody say orgy.”

“No orgies,” Jester said. “Just, you know, talking about orgies.”

“That’s also good.”

“Here, I’ll lead,” Beau said, and held out a hand for Nott.

“By all means,” Nott said, and Beau tipped a cheerful wink at Jester before spinning Nott away from the group.

Jester put a hand on Caleb’s shoulder. “Hey, I’ll talk to you later, okay, Caleb?”

“I’ll be here,” Caleb said.

Jester wound her way through the mostly-drunk crowd in Fjord’s direction, and took a seat next to him on the bench, squeezing herself in between a large half-elf woman in armor on her left and Fjord on her right. The music was louder in the corner next to the band. Fjord downed the rest of his drink, finishing the pint in a single pull.

Jester took a deep breath, as the music lulled between songs.

“So I wanted to say, Fjord, I was thinking about what we talked about earlier - _you know_ \- and I wanted to let you know that sex is not always like that. You should totally try having sex again. You know, without the magic part. _Definitely_ try having sex again,” she said, earnestly.

Fjord didn’t say anything to that, and Jester was just starting to feel weird about it when he slid a look at her she couldn’t interpret.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said slowly.

“ _Normal_ sex,” she repeated, just to be clear. “Not, like, sex-magic sex.”

A bard playing some sort of stringed instrument counted down a fast rhythm and launched the motley assortment of musicians into yet another raucous jig, and the volume of the entire tavern rose as a whole, like the tide at high water, as people spoke louder to be heard over the music. Jester pitched her voice up to continue making her point; it was super important that Fjord understand this.

“Because sex is, like, really good, Fjord. It’s crazy good, and not weird or scary and I just really, really think you’d like normal sex.” She shouted the words in his direction, and the half-elf woman next to Jester shot her a strange look.

Fjord dipped his head closer to her, speaking over the music as well. “Got it.”

Seriously, Fjord was so awesome; he was, like, the best person that Jester knew. She smiled up at him. “Do you want to dance?”

Fjord moved his mouth close to her ear and spoke quietly, under the din of the room. “Sure.” His breath curled warmly around her ear.

Jester shivered, and tried not to remember.

Fjord was a pretty decent dancer. He was better than Caleb at not tripping over his own feet, although he lacked the polished, taught flourishes that peeked through Caleb’s somewhat confused steps. They took a tour around the room, bumping into Nott and Beau still dancing together, and Jester laughed as Fjord spun her under his arms a couple times, making her happily, pleasantly dizzy. Caleb was sitting up against the back wall, eyes closed, stroking Frumpkin in his lap, and Molly had disappeared up the stairwell with the barkeep he’d been dancing with and a large, cheerful woman who they’d seen working on the docks the previous day.

Fjord’s hands felt large and steady against Jester’s waist as they danced, and if Fjord’s gaze lingered on Jester in a way it never had before, something speculative in his expression, Jester didn’t notice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A final thank you to my beta readers: [blackestglass](http://blackestglass.tumblr.com/) and [masonjo](http://masonjo.tumblr.com/). You two are the best!
> 
> If you enjoyed this story and would like to share it, please consider reblogging [this post](http://blithers.tumblr.com/post/178989615978/siren-11930-words-by-blithers-chapters-33) on tumblr!


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